Into the Darkness

by Robin Bowles

  As I listened, I was reminded how many of Phoebe’s family and friends had said the same thing. Many of them didn’t discover the means of her death until days later. To Alice, Linda, Bren, Viv, and Sarah, it wasn’t only her death that was a mystery but also the method she’d chosen. Over the balcony or pills, perhaps, but the rubbish chute?

  Mr Moglia asked Bren to comment on his interpretation of Phoebe’s drug-taking, and whether he could distinguish the effects of the various drugs she took.

  ‘I could distinguish between something like speed or ecstasy to alcohol. My knowledge of her taking prescribed drugs was very minimal. It was probably only in the last 12 months to 18 months that I knew she was doing something like that.’

  He only saw her twice during that time, so how would he know at all? Perhaps she told him during one of their phone calls.

  That was it from Bren. No one else had any questions and he was excused.

  *

  The next witness was Phoebe’s friend Bob Gold. He was younger than Bren — I guessed he was closer to Phoebe’s age — dressed like a student, or an artist.

  Before his evidence was taken, the Coroner told him what he could expect if he gave any evidence that included information about drug offences he and Phoebe might have committed. Bob could refuse to answer questions on the grounds the answers might incriminate him, but if the Coroner then instructed him to provide answers in the public interest, Bob would have to answer and the Coroner could issue him with a certificate under s57 of the Coroners Act protecting him from being charged, so his evidence in this case couldn’t later be used against him.

  Bob replied that he’d like to take advantage of that, and asked the Coroner to issue a certificate, which he did.

  Bob also pointed out that he’d only received his summons the previous day and had ‘no idea of what was happening right now’. After His Honour had brought him up to speed, Bob said, ‘OK, cool’ and began his evidence.

  He said he and Phoebe had clicked when they met at art school, but then drifted apart because of her drinking. Bob was trying to stay clear of both alcohol and drugs. He’d come off hard drugs some time before, he said, and ‘I just couldn’t handle people on them anymore. It really made me feel ridiculously anxious so I just tried to avoid the situations as much as possible.’ Later, he remarked, ‘I’m quite sure I don’t want to take illicit drugs or alcohol again. I don’t think I can handle the headspace for it.’

  Bob said he’d been deeply affected by Phoebe’s death, so much so that he couldn’t even look at Facebook messages she’d ‘liked’, because he’d see her name and ‘know she clicked it’.

  He said their relationship was such that they could send a message out of the blue if something was happening in their lives, and they’d both be confident that the other would understand.

  On 30 November, Bob received Phoebe’s Facebook message asking him to catch up face-to-face and have a drink. When they did meet later that day, he said the reason for the meeting seemed to be that she ‘was having some difficulties with Ant and just not wanting to necessarily live there anymore but she didn’t want to just take herself back to her mother.’

  He said when they met up, Phoebe was in a good mood, but he’d been shocked to see that she’d chopped her hair short. They’d giggled about this new-look Phoebe for a while, then moved into discussing their problems with their partners.

  ‘We had quite a deep relationship,’ he said, ‘not physical, we could just talk about whatever and not even see each other for a really, really extended period of time.’

  He said Phoebe had talked about going to India — ‘somewhere that was just absolutely devastated so that she could, I guess, start from square one again’.

  Ms Siemensma asked if this was a ‘pipe dream’ rather than reality.

  He replied with another comment I seemed to have heard before. ‘Her pipe dreams would very quickly come to fruition, so nothing would be taken too lightly when she said it. If she wanted to go, she would make it happen somehow,’ he said.

  Many of her friends have said if Phoebe wanted something, she’d make it happen. People have described her as forceful, stubborn, wild, untameable. Now here was Bob, saying the same thing. Had she been so determined to get into that chute, even when she was ‘legless’, that the degree of difficulty didn’t deter her? I guessed that’s what we were there to find out.

  Bob said they’d discussed suicide often as a way out of their relationship woes. ‘We’ve both got histories of psychiatrists, doctors, whatever,’ he told the Coroner.

  Bob tried to explain further. ‘It’s not like we sat there discussing suicide. If it came up when she was upset, or if I was very upset, we were able to say, “It’s just not worth going on anymore.” The other person could accept it and try to offer some sound advice. We’d never say, “I’m going to kill myself, can you save me?” or discuss ways we might do it. Never.’

  Bob was obviously nervous, but he was very open and sincere in his answers. He described how he’d waited in the car outside Balencea while she went up to collect her old phone for the numbers that were stored; going to Port Melbourne for Phoebe to buy drugs (just two ecstasy tablets from a place he didn’t know); and ending up at his home in Yarraville at around 5 or 6 p.m.

  Her behaviour changed on the way, and he thought it was because she’d taken an ecstasy tablet. He said she was saying ‘Let’s go do this, let’s go do this, let’s jump in the car and drive here.’ When they arrived at his place and he showed her his work, ‘she was just non-stop, grabbing through my pictures too quickly, or trying to be too close to my cat’.

  She got out of hand, wrestling him to the ground. He had tears in his eyes, because he had to restrain her forcibly, straddling her across her waist and holding her wrists to the ground. She wriggled away and ran outside, where she played chicken with the slow-moving traffic until he decided to take her home.

  Ms Siemensma asked if he’d restrained her by her shoulders, her upper arms or her neck.

  ‘No, I definitely never touched her neck, no, no.’ He didn’t want to hold her in a way that would make her ‘freak out even more’. He didn’t think he’d held her arms or shoulders either, but couldn’t be sure, because it was all a bit of a blur.

  At one point, she was bashing on the door to his brother’s bedroom, pleading to be let in. Bob was asked whether she’d hurt her hands or knuckles, but he didn’t think so. His brother was there and didn’t want to be involved, so Bob apologised and took her back to the other room.

  Then her mood suddenly changed. ‘She went back to being really happy and wanted to go for a walk. It really was quite insane, just flipping from one side to the other … I was wondering what she’d taken, because I hadn’t seen anyone behaving like this for a while.’

  After a few more episodes with Phoebe ‘flipping in and out’, he knew he had to take her home. ‘I had to get her away from my brother, who was upset, the cat as well, and myself. It was all too much and not really her, so I knew we’d speak again in a few days.’

  We have no idea how other people live, I was thinking. Here was a fairly successful young artist (on the surface), a beautiful and talented girl in a loving relationship (on the surface), and their lives included episodes like this. And the poor cat!

  They finally left Bob’s house at around 9 p.m., he said, and he attempted to drive her home, but she insisted he pull over near Festival Hall. He thought she just wanted to talk, but she leapt out when he stopped the car. Bob said, ‘She jumped out with her bag, left the door open, and ran.’ He was in a place where he couldn’t stop the car. ‘So I went up the street a little bit, pulled over to the side and just couldn’t see her anywhere at all.’

  ‘She didn’t say she didn’t want to go back to Ant, she just wanted to “keep driving, we’ll just see where we go”. I got no indication that she was scared to go back there. She d
idn’t want to go anywhere.’

  He told the Coroner, ‘The whole situation has been so much for me to try and handle that I have blocked out as much as possible.’

  Mr Moglia wanted to get more details about how Bob had held Phoebe down. Bob demonstrated that he had her wrist between his thumb and forefinger with his fingertips on the ground, just trying to restrain her.

  ‘Does that mean that you were not holding on to her wrists with your fingertips?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did she sustain any injuries on that afternoon or shed any blood from any scratch or cut or any injury at all?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  Mr Galbally was also interested in these injuries. He said, ‘I’m not asking you to reconstruct things — if you can’t answer my question, please say so — but you’ve explained having a fairly violent wrestle with her?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say violent.’

  ‘I thought you said in your statement, “She was then getting more violent and punching me and kicking”?’

  Bob said that this was the first time he’d read his statement since giving it. ‘I believe it hasn’t been taken down necessarily correct. I think she was becoming more violent because she was starting to become more physical, but I could see and sense within her she didn’t understand that she was pushing those barriers so it was just fun to her. So it was volatility as opposed to directed violence, I guess.’

  ‘You wrestled with her?’

  ‘I restrained her. She wanted to have a bit of a wrestle with me.’

  ‘So my question is, in restraining her or managing to put her in the car later, is it possible that you have held her upper arms, not her shoulders, for example to get her into the car?’

  ‘There would have been potential, absolutely, given the volatility of the situation,’ Bob replied.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Galbally. He’d got what he needed.

  Mr O’Neill had no questions, so Bob made a relieved escape, with instructions from His Honour to collect his ‘comfort’ certificate on the way out.

  *

  The last witness for the day was Ruth Foster, the lady from Balencea who’d reported the stranger in the lift on the day Phoebe died. I had to suppress a little smile when she was asked if she wanted to change anything in her statement.

  ‘Yes, there are changes. Mainly punctuation,’ she replied. Police who type up statements are not known for their command of grammar.

  Perhaps Ruth used to be an English teacher? I’m with her — punctuation is important. The Coroner told her not to worry about it unless it changed the sense of her statement, but there was no stopping Ms Foster from correcting parts of the statement that didn’t make sense. She and the Coroner haggled over commas, full stops, and words that weren’t there but should be, or were there but shouldn’t be. Finally, they arrived at an agreed version, which was read to the court.

  I’d been told that her evidence wasn’t considered to be very reliable, not because she’d deliberately said anything misleading, but rather because she may have been mistaken about the time and date when she saw the man in the lift. The first time she’d raised the incident with Eric had been weeks after the event, and people’s memories are not all that reliable.

  Today, however, she told the court that she was positive about the day she saw the man come into the lift, and the same day Phoebe was found, because she’d shared the lift with a doctor from another floor and they’d had a chat, which they rarely did. The swipe fob records confirmed that they’d been in the lift together on that day at that time.

  She said she didn’t tell Eric that she’d seen the man in the blue shirt until she heard there was a police investigation into Phoebe’s death. After that, she waited about four weeks to hear something from the police, then she asked again.

  Eventually, by the third time she’d approached Eric, she said, ‘There was some talk. Maybe it was just talk, you know, gossip around the building that there was thought to be suicide and the case had been wound up quickly.’

  She said that what she’d noticed wasn’t so much the man himself as what he’d been carrying. ‘I thought it looked like a suction bottle, and to me that wasn’t the sort of thing you’d be carrying into an apartment. Having been a registered nurse — midwife — I know how a suction bottle looks, it was an empty bottle with a normal lid.’

  So she wasn’t a retired teacher. I wasn’t either, but I was also a nurse. Are ex-nurses sticklers for punctuation?

  She was shown a photo salvaged from that day’s CCTV footage. It appeared to have been taken in B1 and showed a youngish, dark-haired man in a blue T-shirt, workman’s trousers, and heavy boots carrying a large, clear bottle that may have had a length of tubing attached to the lid.

  ‘Might this have been the bottle? Might this have been the man? Or you’re not sure?’ Ms Siemensma asked.

  Ruth wasn’t sure. ‘That could be the suction bottle, that could be tubing. Perhaps the vision keeps nagging at my brain because I worked in hospitals for 43 years, surrounded by suction bottles.’

  O’Neill pointed out that the witness had made the connection to the twelfth floor much later, after she’d seen the man, but before she went to see Eric.

  But had the man been identified? Police had distributed his image to the media, but no one was saying, or not yet.

  And that was it for the day. I was grateful. I had writer’s cramp.

  *

  After the witness had stood down, there was a bit of discussion among the lawyers and the Coroner. His Honour asked O’Neill if he had any information about how the police analysis of Ant and Phoebe’s shared iMac was coming along,

  O’Neill couldn’t help him. ‘Can I indicate to Your Honour this is a matter which will take a month of one person’s time to perform these tasks?’

  The Coroner wasn’t trying to apply any pressure, just wanted an update. ‘I’m grateful for the assistance,’ he assured O’Neill.

  ‘I was just going to let Your Honour know,’ O’Neill rejoined, ‘that it’s possible that if a high priority matter comes in we might get bumped, but of course we’ll keep the court made aware if anything like that happens.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll maintain our firm indication of interest,’ the Coroner said drily.

  ‘I’ll be fighting for this case, Your Honour, I can assure you of that.’

  It had only been four years. Barely a blink of an eye, really.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE COPS

  I checked with the police media unit to see if the guy in the lift had been identified. The release I was looking at, headed ‘Image Released Regarding Death in 2010’, had been distributed twice already. This one was dated 15 April 2013. The media officer told me there’d been no result.

  I thought that was puzzling. If you were the bloke in the lift, wouldn’t you want to rule yourself out?

  *

  The next witness was Detective Senior Constable Justin O’Brien. Although he was fairly junior, not four months out of detective training school at the time of Phoebe’s death, his evidence was important because he was one of the first on the scene, along with his partner Clare Hocking and their supervisor, Sergeant Graeme Forster. Justin had also spent a lot of time with Ant on the night, standing at the door of the small room in Balencea where he was being comforted by family and friends, accompanying him to and from the St Kilda Road complex, and remaining with him while he gave his statement there.

  O’Brien had made a few notes about Ant from his observations on the night. Galbally tried to get them excluded, describing them as ‘singularly unhelpful’ because they included the observation that Ant didn’t appear to have actually shed tears. Galbally likened this to the ‘Lindy Chamberlain effect’, where the media used the fact that the bereaved mother hadn’t wept as a sign of her guilt.

  Galbally told the Coron
er, ‘It can’t assist you and is the fodder of novelists. They are observations made an hour or two after Mr Hampel has been told of his partner’s death. And there are other witnesses who describe his upset, distraught state.’

  The Coroner wasn’t convinced. He thought the comments could be relevant, given that they’d been made by a police officer with experience of these things. Nobody else objected. His Honour told Galbally that the comments might not be helpful to his client, but he was mindful to admit them.

  ‘The question, Your Honour,’ Galbally responded, ‘is not as to whether it’s helpful to Mr Hampel, the question is as to whether this evidence is helpful to you.’

  ‘Having regard to that consideration, this application is refused,’ the Coroner said.

  It didn’t take Ms Siemensma long to get around to O’Brien’s contentious statements. He’d stood in the doorway of the room at Balencea noting Ant’s comments between 9 p.m. and 9.58 p.m. on the night of Phoebe’s death. They were read out one by one. Ant had said: ‘I’m so lucky I didn’t fight with her last night … I made her dinner and tucked her into bed … She was still sleeping when I left … I shouldn’t have gone to work … She wrote all these notes today like she was drunk ... I could smell vodka and there was a broken glass and that’s what she writes when she’s drunk … I don’t know what to do now … We could have worked it out … I didn’t want to appear weak … I need something for my head … She can’t be gone … I can’t even imagine her gone … My girlfriend’s dead … This is my whole life gone.’

  O’Brien had also noted the sentence, ‘He was with her all day.’ It transpired that he was talking about Yoshi, the dog.

  At St Kilda Road, O’Brien accompanied Ant while his statement was taken. He wrote, ‘I observed that there was no tears running down his face, nor did it appear that there had been any at all. Hampel was sniffling, yet there was no sign of snot coming from his nose. His eyes were not bloodshot or red, and his face appeared quite normal.’